not give us a home for wife and children. The visible so much appeals to us: it is there that we are nourished and find comfort and power. I cannot sell my vision for bread; bread comes from the field and I must sow and gather there. The unseen has no rating in the places of exchange; merchandise has worth to give me friends and keep my body strong. Therefore I seek for things that can be seen and sold.

It was not easy for Peter to leave his nets and boats. He could sail the boat and handle the nets, but he had never been a shepherd. The new work always makes one hesitate. Who knows the difficulties and defeats which lie in the untried paths? The known is not flippantly to be cast off for the unknown. Men do not master a vocation without time and effort, and when once a degree of success is attained they are slow to leave it. Experience breeds conservatism and knowledge is the mother of caution.

Peter loved the old life too. The boats and nets were his, not by fiat, but by virtue of his thought and labor, his ambition and economy. Had he not wrought his life into them-poor, mean things perhaps, but his very own? How could he ever love another work as he loved this? There lay his years floating on the sea, and to leave them was to leave himself.

Ah, yes; but from the moment the strange Man appeared Peter was undone. When he knew only his boats and fishing he could be content.

But

there are visions which disturb contentment, calls which break sleep forever. The eagle stirs up her nest, compelling the brood to learn to fly, and God always touches the soul with a summons to grow. When the youth met Socrates he had to be Plato; when the monk climbing the steps at Rome heard the words, "The just shall live by faith," he was sealed to become Luther, the reformer; when John Wesley felt his heart strangely warmed he was bound by everlasting fealty to a new task; when Wendell Phillips heard the prison doors close upon Garrison in all the world there was but one thing for him to do! In all the world there was but one thing for Plato and Luther and Wesley to do. They must obey the vision and bring it as a reality into the lives of other men.

It requires a struggle to leave self and serve others, to forget the nets and become a shepherd. Men are sad when they first meet Jesus Christ: he asks so much of them. He breaks into the calm of their lives, destroys their purposes and loves and gives them a new order. But if they obey-ah, if they but obey!-winter is summer and storm is sunshine. In all the reaches of human happiness there is no joy to be compared with that which comes when a man discovers that he has bound himself to the infinite and grown more fully into the likeness of the Divine. After long periods of selfishness and easy contentment, suddenly to find that he has clarified his soul, is

doing a bigger work, a man's work, God's work, a man rejoices with a joy unutterable.

Peter never returned to his boats. It is the testimony of his brave and steadfast after life that he never wanted them again. All that he suffered of poverty and contumely, of hate and imprisonment are mute but splendid evidences that it is better to be a shepherd than a fisherman. When Assisi turned from plenty and ease to follow the inner gleam which made him the wonderful lover of the loveless, I am sure that there was some mighty compensation which made wealth and honor seem cheap and tawdry. When David Livingstone hid himself in the Dark Continent, though stricken with fever and tortured by a daily death, he must have had an inner glory that made him count all as nothing in order that he might feel the throb of truth pulsing through his life to the meager life of others.

Such souls have bartered the lower values and their inevitable life impoverishment for the splendor of the unseen. "Something divine," to use the words of Aristides, is surely mingled with a humanity that has made such ventures of faith, such offerings of the visible for the invisible as are on record. And men unaided do not conceive these things. It is Jesus Christ who flashes the vision before them and bids them exchange the lower for the higher. Nay, more than that: he himself is that vision and that call. Everything which he is represents the permanent and in

creased spiritual idealism of mankind. It is the spirit of Jesus Christ perennially present which gives to the race and to the individual that majesty and might which rolls the world from age to age into a whiter and stronger light. The spirit of Jesus Christ has been great enough to include in its own nature all the questions of society and politics and art and commerce, all questions practical and speculative, through all the reaches of the years. In every age he has been coming again and again; rather, he has never left mankind alone. Since the dawn of creation Jesus Christ has been making his appeal in every great and vital question of justice. There has never been a time when he has not stood at the heart of every struggle between right and wrong. There has never been a reform which he did not sanction, never a sin which he did not condemn. Empires and civilizations have risen and decayed, but through all the years of history, there has been one thing as lasting as eternity. It is the spirit of the ideal, the presence of truth, the appeal of right-all of which have found themselves alive and mighty in the incarnation and omnipotence of the personality of Jesus Christ.

I know nothing that gives men greater hope than this. If there is a philosophy of history, that which gives outstanding unity to the series of events is the continual presence of what Jesus Christ stands for. Age after age he has appeared asking men to accept an enlargement of service

In one age

and an added strength for the task. he came to the world as the universal Brother and wrote in the hearts of men the divine decrees of human fellowship. Another time he appeared with messages concerning the home and made the race seal it with purity and righteousness. You will find him speaking to philosophers and scientists, invigorating them with a strong love of truth. He stands there, this imperial Figure among the cabinets of kings, the congresses of republics, imposing new trusts, exhorting to large faith, unfolding visions of the glory that should be. There he stands, the High Priest of human souls, girding and regirding them to battle, to sacrifice, to martyrdom, to death. I want you to see this. I want you to look into your histories to see just how Christ has been coming to the earth again and again in the decay of every evil, in the uprise of every good. Every reform has been his, every impulse which has driven man from contented littleness to undertake heroic greatness was first in his heart. "quickening spirit."

He is the

We are to be

The appeal of

There is one thing for us to do. men and women of the open soul. Christ comes to us. The work of our fathers is done; nevertheless, an eternal imperative is laid upon us. I do not know its particular character, but I do know that we are not left out, that every one of the open soul will be called again and again to leave boats and nets to become shepherds. The